Bananas are a healthy fruit for most people (there is such a thing as a banana allergy, so we can’t extend it to all people, but certainly most people).

Full of fiber, carbs for energy, vitamins and minerals, and a stack of nutritious phytochemicals.

One thing we will quickly say as a small counterpoint, which isn’t the main point of today’s article but is worth mentioning: the claim of bananas being “a good source of potassium” is true but greatly overstated; they’re not even in the top 10 of fruits for potassium; just, it was mentioned in a popular TV show, referenced in another popular TV show, and then the English-speaking world never let it go.

But that’s just a minor “not quite as good as people make it out to be” thing, rather than an actual negative.

So, what’s the problem with bananas?

It’s about polyphenol oxidase (PPO)

Researchers (Dr. Jodi Ensunsa et al.) found that adding bananas to berry smoothies drastically reduced flavanol absorption, with blood levels dropping by about 84% compared with a flavanol capsule or a low-PPO berry smoothie.

Quick recap on what flavanols are: flavanols are a kind of polyphenolic plant compounds linked to cardiovascular and cognitive health, that are found in foods like blueberries, blackberries, grapes, apples, pears, tea, and cocoa.

See for example: Are You Getting The Right Kinds Of Flavonoids? ← flavanols are a kind of flavonoid

Why bananas had this effect: bananas contain high amounts of polyphenol oxidase (PPO), which (as you might have guessed) mediates the oxidation of polyphenols; it’s the enzyme responsible for the browning of cut fruit, and the researchers believe PPO breaks down flavanols before your body can absorb them.

What the study tested: healthy participants consumed:

• a banana-based smoothie with high PPO activity
• a mixed berry smoothie with low PPO activity
• a flavanol capsule control

What they saw in the results: the berry smoothie produced flavanol absorption similar to the capsule control, while the banana smoothie produced much lower levels of flavanol metabolites in blood samples.

Also! A surprising follow-up finding: even when flavanols and banana were kept separate until consumption, absorption was still reduced, suggesting that PPO continues degrading flavanols in the stomach after ingestion.

You can read the paper in full, here: Impact of polyphenol oxidase on the bioavailability of flavan-3-ols in fruit smoothies: a controlled, single blinded, cross-over study

Quick note before we move on: no, the study doesn’t mean bananas are unhealthy; bananas still provide many wonderful nutrients; it’s just that they don’t pair well with flavanol-rich foods if maximizing flavanol intake is your goal 🙂

Want to learn more?

On a similar topic (it has many important bits of information like the one we discussed today), you might like to check out:

Make Your Vegetables Work Better Nutritionally

As for why you might want to favor getting it from food if you can, then while the title says “vitamins”, this book discusses an assortment of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients; the “other nutrients” category including amino acids (branched chain and essential), prebiotics and probiotics, and triglycerides of various kinds:

Eat Your Vitamins – by Mascha Davis, RDN ← see our review, here

Take care!

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝Is it possible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, or do we need to focus on one and then the other, and if so, which order is best?❞

Contrary to popular belief, you can do both simultaneously! However, it’s not as easy as doing just one or the other, which is why most bodybuilders, for example, have a “building phase” and a “cutting phase”.

The reason it’s difficult is because of the diet. Growing muscle doesn’t just take protein and micronutrients; it takes energy as well, which must come from carbohydrates and/or fats. Therefore, it is tricky to eat enough to build muscle and to fuel the workouts that are required to build the muscle (you can’t hit the gym in a state of rabbit starvation* and expect to perform well at your workout), while at the same time not eating enough carbs/fats to have any excess to store as fat.

*So-called because rabbit-meat is very lean, such that when during times of famine, European peasants tried to subsist off mostly rabbits, their health quickly plummeted for lack of energy. It’s also been called “salmon starvation”, apparently, for the same reason:

How ancestral subsistence strategies solve salmon starvation and the “protein problem” of Pacific Rim resources

In French it’s called “mal de caribou” (caribou sickness), by the way. But you get the idea: eat too much lean protein without enough carbs/fats, and woe shall befall.

So, if you want to do both at once, you need to be incredibly on top of your macros, and the bad news is, only you (or a coach working directly with you) can work out what precise macros requirements your body has, because it depends on your body and your activities.

The easier “half-way house”

We will get to the “building phase” and “cutting phase” of bodybuilders, but first, here’s an option that’s very worthy of consideration, and it is: forget about your weight and just focus on health while incidentally doing regular resistance exercises and HIIT.

What will happen if you do this (assuming a healthy balanced diet, nothing special and without counting anything, but we’re talking at least mostly whole-foods, and at least mostly plants; the Mediterranean diet is great for this, as it is for most things) is:

• The dietary approach described will gradually improve your metabolic health if it wasn’t already good. If it was already good, it’ll likely just maintain it, rather than improve it.
• The resistance exercises will, if engaged with seriously (it has to be difficult to do, or your muscles won’t have any reason to grow), gradually build muscle. This will be very gradual, because you’re not eating for bodybuilding, nor optimizing your general lifestyle for same. Historically many women have feared lifting weights because they don’t want to “look like a weightlifter”, but the kinds of bodies that word brings to mind are not the kind that happen by accident (especially for women, with our different hormones guiding our bodies to a different composition); it takes a lot of single-minded dedication to specifically optimize size gains, for a long time.
• The high-intensity interval training (HIIT) will more rapidly improve your metabolic health, and unlike most forms of exercise, it will actually result in a gradual reduction of fat, if you have superfluous fat to lose. This is because whereas most forms of cardio exercise increase the heartrate for a while but then have a corresponding metabolic slump afterwards to make up for it, HIIT confuses the heart (in a good way) which results in it having to grow stronger, and not doing any compensatory metabolic slump:

How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body) ← as well as the “how to”, this also gives some of the science behind it, too

This will, thus, result in gradual gain of muscle and loss of fat—or if you take it easier with the exercise, then you can easily settle into just maintaining your body composition as it is, but that wasn’t the question today.

So, there you have it, that’s how to do both at once! Now, if you want more dramatic results, then more dramatic methods are called for:

What bodybuilders (mostly) do

Matters of genetic predisposition and commonplace use of steroids aside, here’s how bodybuilders get that “lots of muscle, no fat” figure:

1. First, get into “moderate” shape if not already there.
2. Bulk up: eat amounts of food that will seem unreasonable to a non-bodybuilder; eating 2x or even 3x the “recommended” daily calorie amount is common; focus is typically on getting adequate (for bodybuilding purposes) protein while also carb-loading for workouts and getting at least enough fats for fat-soluble vitamins to work. In the gym, focus on doing sets of very few reps with the heaviest weights one can safely lift, while doing minimal cardio, and also sleeping a lot (9–12hrs per day), which is essential because this is putting a huge strain on the body and it needs a chance to recover and rebuild.
3. Cut down: maintain protein intake (to at least mostly maintain muscles) while keeping carbs and fats low, doing cardio work (HIIT is still ideal) and running a calorie deficit for a short while (there is no use in trying to maintain a long-term calorie deficit; your body will try to save you from starvation by storing any fat it can and slowing your metabolism).

Phases 2 and 3 are then cycled, alternating every month, or every 6 weeks, or every 2 months or so, depending on personal preferences and scheduling considerations (bodybuilders will often have competitions they are working towards, so they need to time things to be at the end of a cutting phase to look their “best” by bodybuilder standards).

Disclaimer: bodybuilding is complex, and can be ruinous to the health if practised inexpertly, because of its extreme nature. We don’t recommend serious bodybuilding per se in general, but if you are going to do it, please consult with a professional bodybuilding coach, and do not rely on a few paragraphs from us that are intended only to give the most basic overview of how bodybuilders can approach the “gain muscle, lose fat” problem.

Want to know more?

We’ve written on some related topics previously; here’s a three-part series:

1. How To Lose Weight (Healthily!)
2. How To Build Muscle (Healthily!)
3. How To Gain Weight (Healthily!) ← this one’s specifically about gaining healthy levels of fat, for any who want/need that

And also:

Can We Do Fat Redistribution? ← yes we can, but there are caveats

Take care!